1 What is the source of the wars and the battles among you? Is it not here—your pleasures that are at war in your members?
2 You crave and do not possess; you kill and are envious and cannot get; you battle and make war. Yet you do not possess, because you do not ask.
3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, so as to squander it on your pleasures.
4 You adulterers and adulteresses, do you not know that love of the world is enmity with God? Whoever, then, wishes to be the world's friend sets himself up as God's enemy.
5 Or do you think the Scripture speaks for nothing? The spirit that has made its dwelling in us longs to the point of envy.
6 But he gives more grace. So it says, "God sets himself against the proud, but to the humble he gives grace."
7 Be subject, then, to God. Stand up against the devil, and he will run from you.
8 Draw close to God, and he will draw close to you. Cleanse your hands, sinners, and make your hearts chaste, you double-souled.
9 Be afflicted, mourn and weep; let your laughter be changed to sorrow and your joy to heaviness.
10 Bring yourselves low before the Lord, and he will raise you up.
11 Brothers, do not speak against one another. Whoever speaks against a brother or judges his brother speaks against the law and judges the law; and if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but its judge.
12 There is one Lawgiver, the one who has power to save and to destroy. But who are you, that you judge another?
13 Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will journey to such and such a city and pass a year there, and we will trade and gain"—
14 you who do not know what tomorrow holds. For of what sort is your life? It is a vapor appearing for a little and afterward vanishing.
15 Rather than that, you ought to say, "If the Lord is willing, we will both live and do this or that."
16 But now you glory in your pretensions; every such glorying is evil.
17 So whoever knows the right thing to do and does not do it, for him it is sin.